So, in total, I ended up viewing 15 films at the HKIFF -- and five other works (Ip Man - The Final Fight, Saving General Yang, The Berlin File, Starlet and The Way We Dance) that screened as part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival in other circumstances. In general, I thought it was a pretty good fest personally for me -- with, interestingly, my favorites of the films I viewed all having been made decades ago...

The
official Closing Film of this year's Hong Kong International Film
Festival begins by telling the story of an Iranian man who went into
hiding with his dog after the keeping of pet dogs was made illegal in
his country. Since I know so little about Iran besides it being very
fundamentalist Muslim, I could actually imagine this tale being based on
reality -- and, at the very least, know that an Iranian lawmaker has indeed proposed the outlawing of pet dogs in his country.

So early on in my viewing of this offering from Jafar Panahi (whose This is Not a FilmI caught at the HKIFF last year) and Kamboziya Partovi, I treated Closed Curtain
as a drama that, even while fictional, had some roots in reality. But
as the film goes on, certain events occur that had me wondering how much
of the work is actually meant to be fantasy and allegory. And by the
film's end, I found myself feeling that this ultimately is a puzzling
work that raises more questions than it gives answers.

Giving the circumstances surrounding its production, it's hard to look at Closed Curtain as just a film as opposed to an act of personal and political defiance by a filmmaker for whom it seems that it'd be going against his nature to desist from making films.
On a related note: this clearly is a film made by someone who has not
lost his abilities to imagine and create -- but there's also a sense of
hopelessness and depression emanating from its main maker that can make
it pretty hard to watch.

My rating for this film: 6 (in terms of watchability and comprehensibility, sadly)